Nassim Taleb’s Cure for Fragility

Is there anyone like Nassim Taleb? The author famous for The Black Swan is a bit of a black swan himself — an unexpected phenomenon arising from the collision of several arcane disciplines and varied experiences to startle us and alter our expectations forever after. He writes as if he were the illegitimate spawn of David Hume and Rev. Bayes, with some DNA mixed in from Norbert Weiner and Laurence Sterne. His ideas are novel, but backed up by a huge store of history and scholarship.

His newest book, Antifragile, is a philosophical tract about the design and evolution of structures as applied to human (and some non-human) institutions. In it, Taleb takes on the whole school of what he calls the Harvard/Kremlin persuasion-top-down planners (he calls them fragilistas) who propose and advocate policies that try, with awful unintended consequences, to decrease the fragility of things rather than to make them “anitfragile.”

It’s an admittedly awkward word, but that’s because it is easiest to understand first what it does not describe. It refers to something that is unbreakable, yes, but not because it is impervious to assault. Something that is antifragile, Taleb explains, actually grows and flourishes because it is stressed and then allowed to order itself in response. Antifragility allows an entity not merely to withstand all the black swans coming its way but to absorb their forceful volatility and emerge only stronger. Fragile things have their real opposite not in durable things, Taleb says, but in “things that gain from disorder.” In the many charts he has produced contrasting fragile and antifragile things, “robust” appears as an intermediate category between the two.

In some ways this is a Hayekian argument. Although it is far better written and far more worldly in its assumptions, it is “small c” conservative all the same. But Taleb has bigger game than Keynes and his followers in his crosshairs. He is really asserting a point of view that aligns him with Seneca, Montaigne, Hume and other “reasonable” thinkers, and against the pure “rationalizers” that descended from Aristotle through Descartes. (But please don’t let any of this put you off. You’ll enjoy and benefit from the book whether this philosophical long-game engages you or not.)

Can I say whether he is right at every turn? Certainly, I am unqualified to evaluate Taleb’s use of statistics and probability (few are, to judge from the long list of technical papers on his CV) and even if I had the right education for it, I couldn’t manage a full defense in the space of a blog post. To his credit he invites responses and publishes in other places the technical appendices that back up his assertions.

What I can say confidently is that Taleb is writing original stuff—not only within the management space but for readers of any literature—and that you will learn more about more things from this book and be challenged in more ways than by any other book you have read this year. Trust me on this.

Taleb can write so originally in part because he has such a different background than the typical authors of these sorts of books. He isn’t involved in academia except at the peripheral level and he left big-company-land many years ago. Neither is he a journalist under pressure to publish. He has the money and motivation to just think and read and talk to people he wants to and tell us what he has learnt. This seems to be all he wants to do.

His originality probably owes as much to his being a born contrarian. He likes to be clear about who and what he loves and hates. He seems, for example, to really like Brooklyn, given how often he uses Brooklyn-type characters and locutions to make his points. I do, too- —and would agree that Brooklyn is as good a place as Singapore to make the case for antifragility. In the “hate” category fall economists, traders, pundits of all kinds, central planners—and a little more generally, people from Harvard. (Apologies to my hosts here!) I have the powerful sense that he welcomes all comers.

However he comes by it, Taleb’s level of originality is astoundingly rare. Just reflect for a moment: How many books have you read that took you into new territory, not only in their conception but in the ideas at their hearts and the worldly experiences of their authors? Hundreds if not thousands of management books have been published in the past few years, but as someone who reads far too many of them, I can’t think of five that have deserved that description.

Taleb actually has something new to say that is worth pondering. And in a world where large-scale, unpredictable events are the norm, pondering it is important. You can count on chaos, and work to make your organization antifragile. Or you can keep planning for the probable. If you choose the latter course, then brace yourself for the next black swan — and pray that it isn’t your swan song.

Larry Prusak is an independent consultant who has co-authored 12 books and many articles. He currently teaches at Columbia University’s MS Program in Information and Knowledge Strategy.